China Telcos lead countries data center industry, partners with LBNL to green its data centers

Web Host Industry Review has a post on US DOE LBNL partnering with China to green data center.  I have had the pleasure of visiting LBNL labs data center efficiency group, and it is a good group to work with for this type of effort for China.  There are also some interesting facts in the post you should think about to understand the China Data Center industry.

First the role of Telcos in data center development.

China differs from the US in that the telecommunications industry has taken the lead over the IT industry in dominating the data center market.

10% of the USA data center capacity is for the Federal government, and there is a huge market for data centers that have nothing to do with the gov’t.  China’s government is the #1 player in data center capacity build out, and you will need to fit in China government’s plans.

Another major difference between China's data center market compared to the US is that most data centers in China are owned and run by the government.

LBNL points out the government influence has an advantage to green the data center in that they only need to convince the government to make the changes.

Sector[sic] Sarton says that this difference could be advantageous if they can "convince the government to make the changes... they can make the changes quicker."

Berkeley Lab is also hoping to work with China to install technologies such as warm-water liquid cooling and DC power through its partner agency.

So what is the project?

The project is being run by Dale Sartor, head of the Building Technology's Applications Team, and Bo Shen of the China Energy Group.

The Berkeley Lab scientists will work with the China Institute of Electronics and the China Electronics Standardization Institute to "share best practices, case studies and other material" to help form standards and training programs for China's data center industry.

Sarton says that China has a wide range of energy efficiency within its data centers but ultimately shows "a lot of room for improvement."

The original article referenced is here in Physorg.com.

Berkeley lab to help China improve energy efficiency of data centers

December 21, 2010

The amount of energy consumed by data centers is increasing rapidly around the world, and China is no exception. With its growing information technology and telecom industries and its emerging status as a supercomputer power, China continues to expand its data center capacity. In an effort to help reduce carbon emissions, the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a world leader in high-performance buildings, has started working with China to improve the energy performance of its data centers.

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China need to decentralize data centers to accommodate demand outstripping supply

Marbridge Consulting references www.cctime.com article on Jan 10, 2011 that China’s data center demand is outstripping supply.

China's Data Center Demand Outstripping Supply

CCTIME, 1/10/11

Last week, standing deputy director Zhou Hongren of the Advisory Committee for State Informatization (ACSI) said that China's data centers were facing a fundamental problem: the speed with which new data centers are being built is being outpaced by growing demand. Furthermore, China's data centers are primarily centralized in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and other regions along the country's east coast, resulting in high power consumption and a heavy concentration of waste heat. Because of this, Zhou said, the migration of data centers northward will be a major trend over time. Zhou added that cloud storage could offer a solution to the issue.

China Unicom has a strategy to create greener data center strategy as data centers move away from the current data center hubs.

Tong Xiaoyu, deputy director of the China Unicom (NYSE: CHU; 0762.HK; 600050.SH) Research Institute, said that owing to energy-saving and cost considerations, Unicom will establish data center industry bases in the energy resource-rich provinces in central and western China.

Keywords: Zhou Hongren, cloud computing, Tong Xiaoyu, China Unicom Research Institute, China Unicom, telecom, Advisory Committee for State Informatization, data center, 0762.HK, 600050.SH, CHU, energy efficiency

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Google Mail/Apps ups SLA, removes schedule downtime allowance

Data Centers and uptime is assumed.  Service Level Agreements (SLA) are made between groups.  But, many times there are exceptions for planned maintenance/downtime vs. unplanned downtime when calculating SLA.

InformationWeek reports on Google Apps/Gmail's change to this common practice.

Google Promises No Planned Downtime

A new service level agreement (SLA) for Google Apps customers strives to make Google's cloud as reliable as dial tone.

By Thomas Claburn ,  InformationWeek
January 14, 2011 02:42 PM

Google has changed its service level agreement for paid versions of Google Apps, its suite of online applications. The goal, says Google Enterprise product management director Matt Glotzbach, is to deliver service that's as reliable as telephone dial tone.

For today's mobile generation, who may lack experience with landlines, let it suffice to say that dial tone under Ma Bell was very, very reliable. Not sunrise reliable but chances were if you didn't hear a dial tone when you picked up a handset, the phone was disconnected from the wall.

Google is taking a leadership position.

But with millions of enterprise customers, Google aims to become more reliable. As a sign of its commitment, the company has disavowed planned downtime. "Unlike most providers, we don't plan for our users to be down, even when we're upgrading our services or maintaining our systems," wrote Glotzbach in a blog post. "For that reason, we're removing the SLA clause that allows for scheduled downtime."

Glotzbach says Google is the first major cloud service provider to make that pledge.

In Google's blog post they call out the competition.

Gmail: 99.984%
In 2010, Gmail was available 99.984 percent of the time, for both business and consumer users. 99.984 percent translates to seven minutes of downtime per month over the last year. That seven-minute average represents the accumulation of small delays of a few seconds, and most people experienced no issues at all. For those few who were disrupted for a longer period of time, we're very sorry, and Google Apps for Business customers received compensation where appropriate. We're particularly pleased with this level of reliability since it was accomplished without any planned downtime while launching 30 new features and adding tens of millions of active users.
Seven minutes of downtime compares very favorably with on-premises email, which is subject to much higher rates of interruption that hurt employee productivity. The latest research from the Radicati Group found that on-premises email averaged 3.8 hours of downtime per month. In comparison to Radicati's metrics for on-premises email, our calculations suggest that Gmail is 32 times more reliable than the average email system, and 46 times more available than Microsoft Exchange®.1

Fortunately Microsoft Exchange® customers can still benefit from the reliability of Gmail withGoogle Message Continuity. Comparable data for Microsoft BPOS® is unavailable, thoughtheir service notifications show 113 incidents in 2010: 74 unplanned outages, and 33 days with planned downtime.

You may be thinking I can't do this in my data center.  And you are right you can't.  This solution requires geo redundancy between data centers.  For a bit on some of Google's approach check out this Google presentation at Stanford University.

Google – A study in Scalability and A little systems horse sense

By ksankar

16 Votes

Google’s Jeff Dean did an excellent talk at Stanford as part of EE380 – it is worth one’s time to listen. Very informative, instructive and innovative. As I listened, I jotted a few quick notes.

  • Interesting comparison of the scale in search from 1999 to 2010
    • Docs and queries are up 1000X, while the query latency has decreased 5X
    • Interesting to hear that in 1999 they used to update a web page store in a month or two, but now it is reduced 50000X to seconds!
  • They have had 7 significant revisions in 11 years
  • Trivia : They encounter very expensive queries for example “circle of death” requires ~30GB of I/O
  • Trivia : In 2004, they did a rethink and refreshed the systems infrastructure from scratch
  • He discussed a little about encodings – informative discussion on Byte aligned variable length & group encoding schemes << I have to try it out …
  • Trivia : They have had long distance links failure by wild dogs, sharks, dead horses and (in Oregon) drunken hunters !

The presentation referenced is by Jeff Dean.

image

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Last Month of traffic to Top 5 data center construction companies post, shows Morgan Stanley and Kaiser Permanente

Took a look at the last month, Dec 13 – Jan 12, 2011 traffic to my Top 5 Data Center Construction companies post. 

Roughly 400 hits through Google search. 

Two companies popped up with relatively high traffic.  Morgan Stanley and Kaiser Permanente.

Good chance someone in these companies is looking for data center construction and design.

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Data Center Wingman, who has your back? One of the best Olivier Sanche

Today a group of people are getting together to raise money in memory of Olivier Sanche for his daughter Emilie's college fund.

The Memorial Fun that has been set up at Wells Fargo Bank under the Olivier Sanche Memorial Fund, account #3165058052. The fund is open until January 23rd, the week following the fund proceeds will be presented to Olivier's family towards Emilie's future education.

Olivier and I spent a lot of time together and one of the ways you could describe our relationship is we were wingman for each other.

"The wingman is absolutely indispensable. I look after the wingman. The wingman looks after me. It's another set of eyes protecting you. That's the defensive part.


"Offensively, it gives you a lot more firepower. We work together. We fight together. The wingman knows what his responsibilities are and knows what mine are. Wars are not won by individuals. They're won by teams."
Today, the strategy of having a good wingman is still relevant, but its application reaches far beyond the arena of aerial assault. When fighter pilots lift off into the great expanses of the sky, they may not know what threats lie beyond the horizon. Similarly, with each new day, we have no idea what lies ahead.


The common denominator is that daily challenges are conquered by responsible choices, and creating a culture of responsible choices is reinforced by the presence of a good wingman. In the spirit of the Gabreski quote, "personal battles are not won by individuals; they are won by the reinforcement of good wingmen."

We had each others back and watched out for each other in the data center industry.  Olivier was a wingman I could count on that had integrity that was never questioned.  It is a complex task to green the data center.  Much more than simply getting LEED points.

The challenge, like a thousand-piece puzzle, is that it can sometimes be more difficult than it first appears. The path of least resistance shouts for us to do nothing while a fellow Airman makes a life or career-threatening decision; however, accepting the challenge of being a comrade in arms is a daily whisper for us to courageously be involved. The moral courage to do the right thing is more than just ornamented words; it is the foundation of our Air Force Core Values: Integrity First.

I miss Oliver as a wingman, but any person who uses the concept of a wingman wants more than one wingman/wingwoman.

Who has your back?

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